Friendship (Part 3)
Here is our third and final part of this review, which is longer and I go off track a little. (Read parts one and two)
Friendships, Sex, and Marriage
Mostly when I write these notes, I summarise and comment my way through the book's argument. Here I am going to provide a little more of my own thoughts, dialoguing a bit more with Austin.
How does the Fall affect human equality and friendship in particular? Austin (and to some extent Aelred, it's unclear to me where Aelred's argument is in the fore) has what I would call a slightly unusual reading of Genesis 2 - he sees "the knowledge of good and evil" as referring to political wisdom, linking it to the same phrase in 1 Kings 3.9. And, without the fall, we don't need politics - God's prohibition on the KofGaE is tied to (a) it's not good for the human to be alone, and (b) he wants the human to remain innocent of the craft of rulership. Between the equals, the man and the woman, there isn't supposed to be governance.
The Fall, then, involves a fall into a world of political relations, of superiors and inferiors, and thus the possibility of equality itself is jeopardised. The conditions of friendship are distorted, fallen, and we are in a world of friendships that fail to obtain their due end.
So, from my perspective, this is a very particular reading of Genesis 2, and I wouldn't go along with that particular interpretation of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It seems overly specific. However, I do think we can agree that there are things in Genesis 2 that point directly to equality and difference between the Two in the garden that is instructive for us. And it's instructive both in terms of friendship, and the species of friendship that is marriage.
Back to Austin, who calls chapter 8, on this topic, the hardest one in the book. In Genesis 2 we meet the original human, who awaits a companion to solve the problem of aloneness. And when that other comes, it is a woman. Austin suggests that we read the 'he' of the pre-Eve Adam as a sexless individual, and that it is only with the coming of the Other, that Adam is gendered. I don't entirely buy that, but I am willing to say that without sexual differentiation, there is no sense of male. There is no male without female. And so we have these Two, sharing so much in common, and yet crucially distinct.
I am reminded of a scene in Le Guin's novel "The Left Hand of Darkness", when on a planet of androgynous humans, the narrator (who is male) is asked about the women of his planet:
"Tell me, how does the other sex of your race differ from yours?...Do they differ much from your sex in mind behavior? Are they like a different species?”
"No. Yes. No, of course not, not really. But the difference is very important. I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one’s life"
It is both equality and non-interchangeability that is required to solve aloneness (not loneliness, that is a separate problem!). And then, Austin notes, that the text goes on with Gen 2.24, which is clearly about marriage, but perhaps less clearly to us, it is not a comment made in the Garden, but after the Fall. Because it speaks about "his father and mother", realities that do not exist for Adam in the garden. Marriage as a social institution in which a grown-up male and female leave their parents and establish a new family and have children, is a post-Fall reality.
Genesis 1, by contrast, is trying to show the importance of sexual difference as the means of being fruitful and completing the plenitude of the creation God has made. Genesis 2 has a subtly different and complementary emphasis. It focuses on the problem of aloneness. That problem is solved once there are two humans, one male, one female. Once the problem is solved, there need not be any more. p96
Again, here, I don't entirely subscribe to Austin's reading, because I think part and parcel of the Garden in Gen 1-3, is that it represents a proto-temple, and the place and presence of God, and that if there had been no Fall, then Adam and Eve would have expanded the Garden to fill the earth, and this would have involved raising children. I don't think, contra many early church theologians (and Austin), that there would have been no children without a fall. At least Augustine sides with me here.
However, I do think that this is suggestive to us of something, and perhaps more suggestive of the New Creation than the Original. The older I get, the less clear I am on exactly how things in the New Creation will work. Mostly because we all live in this creation, in this world, and are so embedded in it, that there are numerous features of life under the sun, that it is difficult to conceive how they could be otherwise. Ecology and Death, for instance. Sex, both sexual differentiation, and procreation, seem so bound to a world in which death is part of the parameters, that it's hard to understand how a New Creation is going to work, in which there are no new humans.
The friendship that Adam and Eve enjoy in the garden is a natural and an original good, separate from procreation, not exactly marriage, and it's also characterised by the vulnerability of their state. They are naked, and not ashamed. Why is there shame associated with nakedness outside the Garden? Austin follows Robert Sacks in seeing procreation as replacing immortality, and so nakedness is a reminder of the fall, a reminder of the need for procreation in a world of death.
For clarity, let’s put it baldly. One must have friends in order to be fully human. One need not marry or otherwise have sexual intercourse in order to be fully human. p99
Yes, Genesis 2 points to marriage, but it points even more profoundly to friendship. Yet, we are not trying (or we ought not be trying!) to go back to the Garden. That way is closed, guarded with a flaming sword. And looking forward, it seems, there is no marriage in the kingdom of heaven. There might be sexual intercourse, I think that's an impossible question to answer, let alone to properly ask. But if there is, that's not really the point. The exclusive uniqueness of marriage gives way to the universality of friendship, to a kind of faithful, vulnerable, and communicative friendship that is expansive, not exclusive.
In this life, which includes the eschatological call to have and be friends, some of us, some of the time, experience the particular form of friendship that is marriage. p100
Marriage, then, is a species of friendship, or it ought to be. It is a particular one, but it is one. I think this goes a long way to addressing a range of issues, if we will bear with the question long enough.
For most of history, marriage has not necessarily been thought of as friendship. Certainly for Aristotle, and the many who have followed his line of thinking, it could not be a friendship. It need not be a friendship. It is a social relation of sexual fidelity and exclusivity. But, insofar as it involves a man and wan who should engage as equals, and are bound together for life, this sets the conditions for a friendship. That said, friendship by its nature isn't exclusive, it's expansive. You can have more friends. You should have more friends. I'm not even convinced that one's spouse has to be one's best friend, though they may very well be. The point of friendships is that they are not meant to be in competition with each other. Precisely because marriage is a species of friendship, it is not the highest form of friendship, though we may often find that it is our richest earthly experience of it.
I have been married 15 years, and known my wife for 19 or so. She is my best friend, for no one else has spent so much time with me, crossed continents and cultures, known me so deeply, seen me at my worst, forgiven so graciously and so often, and loved so fiercely. None of those things make her my wife though. Such things are possible in non-marriage friendships, though they are rare. And yet, a friendship that endures like marriage is a true friendship. It couldn't be otherwise.
But what makes it a marriage is an addition to its state as friendship. Christians at any particular time may have many friends, but at most one sexual partner. It is the addition of lifelong sexual union and fidelity that turns a friendship into a marriage. It makes me wonder if speaking more deeply about marriage as friendship, instead of marriage as romance, would properly alleviate the impossible weight that marriage bears in our culture - to find "the one", and "true love", and live a life of bliss with "my best friend forever"; that's not really true nor what marriage is about.
Let's return to Jesus, and Austin's book. Jesus was fully human, never experienced sexual union, and yet he makes possible a deep intimacy between friends that is like that of lovers. I think that is what Jesus is pointing us to in the Kingdom come, but also in an anticipatory way both in marriage, and in non-sexual friendships, mutatis mutandis.
The final three chapters I will pass over more quickly. In Nine, he discusses relatively briefly the Trinity and Friendship - are the persons of the Trinity friends? (yes) What is the difference between being a child of God and a friend of God? (Perspectives on the same reality). In chapter Ten, we are lead through examples of friendship in film and literature, including thoughts on friendship with animals, aliens, clones, and AI. Chapter 11 brings it all together, and home; and here Austin returns to Job. He notes that for all the difficulties, Job's friends do not abandon Job nor break of the conversation. And when God turns up and takes Job on a mystery tour of the marvels of the universe, he is reminded, or taught, of infinite beauty and majesty and finite human ephemerality. The final scene of Job is a picture of communion and friendship - Job, his family, and his friends, feasting, and comforting. Job wanted to speak to God, and God spoke to Job, like Abraham and Moses; and at the end Job speaks to God again, in prayer; and God speaks again not only to Job but also to Job's friend, Eliphaz.
Job’s prayer is a seed pregnant not only with the restoration of human friendship but with the establishment of divine friendship as well. p146
It is this that points us to Jesus, the one who comes to both make us friends of God, and make us friends to each other. To know God means we know him in his awesome power, but also in his gracious condescension, his making possible an equal conversation between us. Austin ends the book with a postscript of "concrete practices", and we'll leave him there for now, and you can hear some of my own reflections.
What strikes me about this book is that here is a topic that we ought to have reflected on deeply over the centuries, and yet I have rarely come across much written so insightfully on friendship. Austin's book is thought-provoking in the best senses of that phrase, and when you take seriously his claim that friendship stands at the heart of Jesus' mission, while one's first reaction may be head-scratching and "really?", the thoughtful reflection, and plumbing of secular wisdom, sacred scripture, and theological tradition, brings out new and old treasures, to show just how important friendship is to us, and to push us to appreciate it, and indeed pursue it, in new ways. I think that is nowhere more evident and challenging than in thinking about the triad of friendship, sex, and marriage. There is a strong cultural tendency to put enormous significance on marriage, and to think that that's the main point of human adult life, a romantic relationship with a single person who will fulfil you, and once you have secured that, the nuclear family becomes a kind of walled-off entity; Austin pushes me in two directions simultaneously - firstly that precisely because friendship is non-exclusive, additive, expansive, we ought to be welcoming and seeking friendships that extend beyond that; but secondly, we ought to be thinking of marriage itself as far more about friendship than it is about other things (sex, children, economics, "family values"). Not least because it is the friendship that endures in eternity, not the marriage.